Review: Moor Mother offers a powerful artistic experience at Walker Art Center

I save my greatest admiration for the artists who create courageously. The ones who have the audacity to blow up the artistic template they’ve been handed and say something with their work that they feel must be said, be it to spill out their heart or address something that desperately needs discussing. Filters and approval-seeking, be damned.

Such an artist is Moor Mother, the performing moniker of Camae Ayewa. Originally from Maryland, she found kindred spirits in Philadelphia who helped her create combinations of classical composition, jazz, hip-hop, hard rock, poetry and visual art. Now a University of Southern California composition professor, Ayewa is a restless musical omnivore who employs spoken word in her creations, often inspired by particular historical issues or incidents.

On Saturday night, she assembled seven other musicians for the U.S. premiere of “The Great Bailout,” presenting it at the Walker Art Center’s McGuire Theater. It was one of the most powerful artistic experiences I’ve had this century, a work so breathtaking as to keep me frozen in amazement at intermission, then thrilled by its unbounded exuberance during the concert’s second half.

Moor Mother is a courageous artist because, with “The Great Bailout,” she faces down a hostile enemy with boldly biting words and music so emotionally honest and expressive as to be both discomfiting and inspiring. With this work, she seems to respond to a U.S. educational trend toward banning the teaching of the history and legacy of slavery by saying, in effect: “No, that’s exactly what we’re going to talk about.”

In accepting a commission from England’s Tusk Festival, she chose to focus on one historical event with an almost two-century impact. In 1837, the United Kingdom created a “slave compensation act,” which didn’t compensate the enslaved, but instead paid their captors for the loss of their “property,” many through annuities that issued their final payments to the enslavers’ descendants in 2015.

But you don’t have to know that history to feel the fury of “The Great Bailout.” It was there from its thunderous opening shout of music, each instrumentalist seemingly purging their pain, from the volcanic rumblings of two basses and Angel Bat Dawid’s piano to drummer Tcheser Holmes explosively attacking his kit to Melissa Almaguer establishing the evening’s most persistently haunting image: Tap dancing on a small platform, seemingly on the edge of exhaustion all evening.

From there, the work proved a sonic odyssey that sounded rooted in the improvisation of free jazz, but with a lyrical and emotional focus guided by Ayewa’s original poetry. There was an unyielding intensity throughout the performance’s first half, which took as a touchstone variations on the gospel song, “My Soul’s Been Anchored,” singer Kyle Kidd’s sweet, silky voice a contrast to Ayewa’s confrontational poetic eruptions.

It was another gospel song that informed the evening’s second half: “I’ll Fly Away” established that we were traveling from darkness into light, and the rest of the concert held a spirit of liberation. It was there in the exhilaratingly propulsive grooves established by drummer Holmes and bassists Melvin Gibbs and Luke Stewart.

But above all, it came through in the wisdom and strength projected by Twin Cities-based master of winds Douglas Ewart as he sent his soprano sax’s tones soaring before making bells of bundt pans and spinning large tops out onto the stage. He proved an essential ingredient in “The Great Bailout” being such an extraordinarily memorable performance.

Rob Hubbard is a Twin Cities classical music writer. Reach him at wordhub@yahoo.com.